CHAPTER XXV
West Adams and Grandfather's house looked queer and countrified and old-fashioned. It was a long long way from a Frat. house on 113th Street to that plain bedroom so full of his little-boy and prep-school personality that Neale felt ill at ease and restless there. How could you live up to your ideal of Horatian calm and sophisticated tolerance towards human life in the presence of people who had known you when you were in short trousers, who only a few years before had been giving you hot lemonade for a cold and tucking you up in bed? No, West Adams was impossible! He looked inside the Emerson one day, remembering what an impression it had made on him, and found it like West Adams, very dull. "The man is so terribly in earnest!" he told himself and was enchanted at the superior, Oscar Wilde tone of his dictum.
The next day he thought of Billy Peters and knew that he was saved. Billy was the most amusing of his Frat. brothers, the one now nearest to him, for he remembered that Billy spent the summers in the Berkshires. He wrote to Billy asking him to come up for a couple of weeks and go camping with him, somewhere up the Deerfield. Neale would meet him at whatever station Billy could make and they would start at once. He didn't invite Billy to Grandfather's, not because he was ashamed of Grandfather's—not at all—he just didn't think it would interest Billy there. In due time Billy's answer came, asking Neale to cut out the wilderness project and come down to make him a visit in the Berkshires. Neale considered, he liked Billy; and West Adams was deadly dull. Why not? There was no good reason why not; he packed his suit-case and went.
Billy met him and drove him to the Peters' cottage, a remodeled farm-house several miles from town. Mrs. Peters was cordially polite, Billy's little high-school kid sister turned blue, admiring eyes on her big brother's friend, who was presented as a most prodigious athlete. After supper, at Billy's suggestion they walked over to the hotel, two remodeled farm-houses with shingled sides joined by mission-furnitured piazzas. Billy introduced him to the "finest little girl ever" and Neale was only half-surprised (knowing Billy fairly well) to find she wasn't the same as the "finest little girl" of the winter before. But that was nothing to Neale; there were plenty of other girls, all delighted to buzz around him, to have him dance or play ping-pong, to make fudge, or walk in the moonlight. Some were pretty and some were not, some were bright and some just boisterous. And it was all the same toO Neale. The Horatian pose was a great success. He was delighted with himself.
At the end of a week he prepared to leave. But Billy couldn't see it that way. It was true that Polly was going to have a couple of girl friends at the house next week, and would want Neale's room, but then they'd want Bill's room too. If Billy was to be exiled to a tent, why couldn't Crit keep him company? They'd move the tent up into the Glen, and really camp out, cook their own grub and everything. Crit had said he wanted to camp out! Why not? After all there wasn't any real reason, why he should go …! Next week there was the coaching parade, and all sorts of fun, decorating the hotel three-seater, with ferns and daisies. Then there was a boating excursion to Long Pond where Sarah Davis fell overboard and Neale pulled her out.
Then there was a fateful straw-ride in the August full moon, very near to Neale's nineteenth birthday, and there he met Miss Austin, a new arrival at the hotel. She was almost as tall as Neale, which was very tall indeed for a girl, and she looked to Neale as though she might have stepped right out of a Gibson illustration. This utterly superlative impression of beauty and good form was not lessened even in broad daylight the next morning, when he saw her again on the tennis-court, where she said good-morning with a special look for him in her very fine gray eyes. She did not play tennis, she sat on a bench at the side, under a purple silk parasol, her long, full, white skirts frilling out in a plaited cone, her pretty, fluffy, brown hair arranged in a high pompadour, which stayed impeccable as the tennis-playing girls grew hot and red, their hair straggling in straight wisps across their shining wet foreheads.
Had Neale ever thought he scorned girls who sat cool and dressed-up on a bench while others played tennis? As soon as the set was over, he went to sit beside her. She glanced at him out of her gray eyes and looked away again. Neale's pulse beat more quickly and he looked hard at the curve of her cheek. Then they began to talk. Before she went in to lunch, she had told him with a wistful note in her voice, that she was glad she'd met him, because most of the people at the hotel bored her so. Neale answered (the truth striking him for the first time), that most of the people bored him too.
If other people were what bored them, they certainly must have been free from ennui for the next few days, for they saw little of any one but each other. Neale's days and evenings were good or bad, according to the extent of his success in monopolizing Miss Austin. On the whole the evenings were the best, the evenings when they sat in a far corner of the hotel piazza and compared notes about their views on life and literature. Miss Austin paid Neale the compliment he most appreciated. She affected to consider him as well-read as she was—what did he think of Meredith, and Ibsen? She discussed Bernard Shaw and "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." Neale had to trust to copious bluffing: to confide heavily in his taciturnity, letting her run on, till she expressed opinions tangible enough for him to agree with her.
The climax of the season was the fancy dress dance at the Prospect House. Everybody went; Billy in a blanket, woodchuck skins and turkey feathers considered himself a passable Uncas. Neale who had caught the early morning train up to West Adams and the milk train back, wore his football suit, with his white sweater like a cloak, the arms tied under his chin—hot but very becoming.
With Billy he started conscientiously to dance in rotation with all the girls from their hotel. His second dance was with Miss Austin. She was in black with a black lace mantilla, and pinned in her hair was one of the roses Neale had ransacked Pittsfield to buy—he forgot the others—forgot everything but the rhythm of their steps together—they danced, sat out on the verandah—danced again.
It was pointed, shameless—the chaperon, whose daughter was sitting a disconsolate wall-flower, glared at them—and they danced on. Had this red-blooded young blade, giving himself up wholly to the glamor of the moment, had he ever taken the cold, dry, heartless doctrine of Horace as a guide to life? He danced on—had he said he only danced when he was caught and had to?—-he danced on, thrilling to the rhythm, like the swinging beat of hearts in young bodies. At last, the piano, violin and cornet (the "orchestra" imported from the city of North Adams), broke into "Home, Sweet Home," and the last waltz began; slow, languorous, the climax of the wonderful evening for Neale.
Then Miss Austin staged her dramatic effect. As the party broke up, she said, putting out one hand to Neale and resting the other on her mother's arm, "Good-night, Mr. Crittenden, and …" she looked down at the roses he had given her, "and good-by. Mother and I are leaving on the morning train. I only waited to have that last dance." She waited an instant to let this have its effect, and added in a lower tone, "Thank you—thank you for—for making my stay here so pleasant."
Now there was, under Neale's skin, neither a calm Horatian philosopher nor a dashing red-blooded young blade. There was only a shy, awkward boy of nineteen, taken entirely unawares, struck dumb by the surge of emotion within him. Helpless and inarticulate, except for a muttered "good-by" he shook Miss Austin's hand and walked away with apparent steadiness.
But afterwards.…! When Billy was snoring inside the tent, Neale sat on the platform outside, and wrestled with Destiny. What a stiff, frozen lump he had been, not to have been able to speak out what was in his heart. She was going! And he had no photograph of her.…! What an idiot never to have thought to ask for one! Not a keepsake! Not even a kiss! It was too hideous. No man with any virility would let Destiny ride rough-shod over him like that. He would be masterful. He would take the same train with her in the morning, he would be reckless, follow her up … Great Cæsar's ghost! But it was cold out there! The night dampness pierced through even his thick sweater. He staggered to his cot, rolled up in the blankets and fell instantly asleep.
He half-wakened once at dawn with the first rays of sunlight, rolled over, looked out into the breathless, pure beauty of the new day dropping slowly in a rain of golden light through the great trees, thought hazily that he was timber-cruising in the Green Mountains again, and fell asleep more profoundly than ever. He was really very tired and his old faculty for prodigious sleeping reasserted itself.
When he finally awoke, the day was ripe, and the light had a late look. Sure enough, his watch said a quarter past eleven. He sat up and stretched, and rubbed his hands back and forth through his frowsy hair. Billy had eaten his breakfast and gone. But he must have brought up the mail and left it for Neale to find; for a letter now fell off Neale's cot to the floor.
The letter was typed, brief and direct like the writer.
"Dear Crittenden:
"We have a hard schedule ahead of us this season. I want all last year's squad to report at the football house for practice on September 1st. I can count on you not to be late.
Neale read it over and over, stupidly at first and then with growing excitement. Alone in the tent, he allowed a broad, childish, unrestrained smile of pure pleasure and pride to shine all over his face.
Then the date struck his eye. He was to report on September first and this was August twenty-fourth. Gosh! Less than a week to get into condition! Not a single minute to lose. His chance might depend on his being in condition.
His chance …! He tossed the blankets off and sprang up, making plans rapidly. The coffee-pot left by Billy was still warm in the banked ashes, but Neale put it aside. No coffee! After his breakfast of oat-meal and toast, he looked longingly at his pipe, but did not light it. No tobacco! He remembered that this was about the time for Miss Austin's train, but he did not change his clothes to go down to see her off. No girls!
Still in his football togs, just as he had danced the last waltz, he set off for the first of his training, a two-mile jog-trot over the hills.